Ask HN: Anyone having issues with job applicant fraud?

He already lied once. Why not lie more?

Live-coding in an interview be it in a text editor (shitty or otherwise - those web based platforms can be really painful and slow to use when sharing a screen with zoom, e.g.) or on a whiteboard is a skill, and I’m not sure it is one that is worth optimizing for because I’m not sure that this particular skill really has much to do with day-to-day software development. I am sure it doesn’t hurt to be able to perform in a foreign environment with someone judging you over your shoulder but I hope dev work in general possesses as little of this type of work as possible.

But you can simplify the problem considerably and ask someone to solve a fairly easy problem in just about any live coding fashion. To wit: I learned Java in school, spent some time at a job using other languages, then interviewed for an intermediate software developer position. The hiring manager asked me to write fizzbuzz in Java. I had never heard of the fizz buzz problem and I hadn’t written Java in some time. Still, I was able to successfully solve the problem with a minimum of difficulty (though admittedly a maximum of nerves). He asked me a few questions about how to improve the solution, and I mumbled some stuff about combining string concatenation statements instead of simply appending to the string, something which made him nod his head sagely and that I still consider to be a largely useless micro-optimization, but the main thing, the important part, is that I demonstrated some coding ability in a matter of minutes, right in front of his eyes.

It’s something that sticks with me and I think it’s a valuable type of interview question.

I got the job.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fizz_buzz

On his resume his name was Daniel, but when he joined the zoom call he introduced himself as Andrew. Moreover the photo on his LinkedIn was of Asian appearance but this guy had a very White American accent. I asked him to turn his video on and he fumbled around for a bit and then said his camera was broken, so giving him the benefit of the doubt I jumped into asking him about his experience with svelte. He asked asked me what svelte was, I thought that was weird given it was one of the buzzwords on his resume, but 20 seconds later he all of a sudden knew what svelte was.

I reminded him that in our email exchange he said he had worked with svelte for 3 years and I'd like to hear more about what he had built. He told me, and no joke, he had worked in the same office as some guys who had used svelte.

I'm not "writing off" a billion people. But. It's like finding a needle in a haystack.

I did some research when this happened, and they even have a name for this [1]

Coincidentally, our experience with people from Easter Europe is quite the opposite: Of all the people we hired from there, all except one were stellar (And the "one" was also good, just that he had some greys ethically: Had a disagreement with our boss, and disappeared over a weekend after siphoning large amounts of data from our system)

[1] https://thepolicytimes.com/chalta-hai-attitude-holding-india...